The present invention relates to a silver halide color photographic material and a method for processing it. More particularly, the present invention relates to a silver halide color photographic material that has good image keeping quality, that can be processed efficiently at elevated temperatures and that produces satisfactory colors.
Yellow, magenta and cyan couplers used in silver halide color photographic materials, say, color prints, that are intended for direct viewing have basic requirements for performance to satisfy such as the keeping quality of dye images. In recent years, an increasing demand has arisen for providing improved color reproduction in order to achieve faithful reproduction of the colors of an object of interest.
Yellow couplers have had the problem of insufficient reproduction of yellow and orange colors on account of the unwanted absorption of color forming dyes at wavelengths longer than 500 nm. To deal with this problem, various attempts have been proposed with respect to the improvement of couplers and the addition of tone modifiers. For instance, Japanese Patent Public Disclosure Nos. 241547/1988 and 256952/1988 proposed methods that are capable of providing satisfactory colors. However, these methods are incapable of sufficiently lightfast images unless anti-fading agents are added. Although various antifading agents have been proposed, their use causes two big problems. First, the effectiveness of tone modifiers is reduced. Second, the density of a yellow image increases during heat treatments (heat treatments were performed during laminating or sticking a color print), producing a yellowish appearance in the heated area.
Under these circumstances, it has been desired to develop a method for producing a yellow image that has satisfactory color, that is lightfast and that will not experience an increase in density during heat treatments. As a result of the extensive studies conducted to meet this need, the present inventors found that the aforementioned problems of the prior art could be solved by using a specified yellow coupler in combination with a specified anti-fading agent.